Book excerpt: "Play and language are both important learning tools for the prekindergarten child. Through play and language, they learn about their world and about themselves. Play and language are also the most important tools for early literacy learning. Think of the young child who takes a memo pad and marker around to family members, 'taking orders' for dinner. Like all emergent readers and writers, this child makes no distinction between play and literacy -- both involve curiosity, excitement, learning, and discovery. In Literacy Beginnings, Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas bring their characteristically rich, comprehensive, and practical insights to the frontier of early literacy. They show you how to tap into young children's curiosity to introduce them to the world of literacy in joyful, engaging ways. Based on their many experiences in real prekindergarten classrooms they demonstrate how to: create a classroom community that is play-based, but that also prepares children for the literary-rich world in which they live, promote constructive learning through inquiry, recognize the language and literacy behaviors and understandings that are appropriate instructional goals for preschoolers, use powerful and playful ways to guide children to learn about letters, sounds, and words, [and] support emergent readers and writers through an array of literacy activities"--Back cover.